Social networking sites (SNS) provide user platforms for posting comments and sharing media files among users via the Internet. Users of SNS usually have access to SNS via a mobile application on mobile devices and a Web application on a desktop or laptop computers. For instance, “Facebook,” provided by Facebook, Inc., Menlo Park, Calif., allows creating a friend network for exchanging messages, sharing pictures and videos, and continuously displaying updates regarding a user between the users. Further, media-sharing sites, one type of the SNS, allow users to upload media files, such as pictures, videos, and audio files to a Website to share the media files with others. For instance, “Flickr,” provided by Yahoo!, Inc., Sunnyvale, Calif., provides a community to selectively share pictures and videos with other users. In addition, “Instagram,” provided by Facebook, Inc., Menlo Park, Calif., similarly provides a tool to share pictures and videos among friends and family members. Mobile devices and computers currently in the market typically equip with devices to create various media files, including cameras, video recorders, and audio recorders. Thus, mobile or computer users can directly upload image files, video files, and audio files through SNS or media sharing sites for sharing the media files with a group of individuals they prefer.
To share media files through SNS or media sharing sites, users typically need to specify a group of individuals to share based on each context of media files. Traditionally, media files uploaded onto the SNS or media sharing sites by a user are manually shared with other users by specifying a receiver of the media files. Further, SNS and media sharing sites have been providing user settings for limiting a display of certain user information to certain individuals or group of individuals. For example, Facebook enables the user to share pictures and videos with public or preferred “friends.” The preferred “friends” can be categorized as “close friends,” “family,” “all the friends in Facebook,” or even an individual friend. However, a selection of individual or groups for sharing has been only manually specified by the user each time when the user uploads each media file based on the context of the media file. Similarly, media sharing sites, such as Flickr and Instagram, allow users to selectively share media files to groups of individuals by manually specifying by the user. Thus, media sharing through SNS and media sharing sites requires the users to take an additional step to specify a group of individuals to share the media files.
Therefore, there is a need for automatically sharing media files with a specified group of individuals based on contexts of the media files when the media files are captured.